Sunday, August 06, 2017

One of my ongoing efforts is to make quest givers not feel like quest givers.

Your typical quest giver is a guy standing around outside a dungeon waiting for an adventurer such as yourself. He can tell you all about a great treasure in the dungeon! Or he will give you a nice sword if you obtain some item from within, like his wallet, or maybe his car keys.

Leading me to wonder why he didn’t go himself. And how long he’s been standing around. Does he sleep? Does he ever go for a pee? Is there a sandwich cart that comes around?

In real life, of course, people rarely offer you jobs out of the blue. (And then it’s in Malmö or Singapore or something.) Generally it works the other way around: you find out that someone has a sword for sale, and you go and ask what they want for it.

The Witcher finessed this nicely. People in that world post “Witcher Wanted” ads near pubs. They are waiting for someone to come to their home to offer them Witcher services, for which they’re prepared to pay.

Fortunately, we have something rare in video games: our characters did not just wake up with full blown amnesia, living in a populated world, where they grew up. They know their fellow Wellies and their fellow Wellies know them.

So we can take the curse off quest giving.

For example, in the Miss Thigh Highs playthrough, you need to learn something about, let us say, washing machines. You know the washing machine repairman, Alfonso Maytag; he has fixed your washing machine, after all. At the pub they say he’s out by the Tor, a local hill.

In a regular video game, you’d meet him out by the Tor, and he’d say, “My friend Freddie has been captured by cultists. Please rescue him and I shall give you this book on Washing Machine Maintenance!”

In our game, he’d say, “My friend Freddie has been captured by cultists!” and your player character, who was in primary school with Freddie, will say, “Oh, my God! Can I help?” Obviously you’re not going to waste time chatting about washing machines while poor Freddie is in danger. After you complete the quest, though, equally obviously, Mr. Maytag will happily let you xerox the manual to your Hi-Capacity 27” Front Load Washer.

From a gameplay point of view, these two setups are exactly the same. Find the quest giver. Learn of the adventure. Complete the quest. Get the payoff.

But from a narrative point of view, one feels more natural and human. That’s important to me. The more real our people feel, the more the player engages with them emotionally.

Video game worlds contain a tiny number of salient objects. Stories allow our minds to weave a whole world in the spaces between them. But we'll only do it if we're engaged emotionally.

Figuring out what makes the quest feel natural instead of gamey is a lot of the effort I put into writing encounters. By comparison, character dialog is easy once I know what relationship the characters have to each other.

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

The audience doesn't know, but they know. That's because reality is shaped weird.

When I'm working on a fictional story, especially in speculative fiction, for a game or a tv show or a movie, there is often pressure to make the story simpler, more streamlined, more concise, more symmetrical. When I say, "Okay, but that doesn't make any sense," or "that's not how that works," or "I don't think he would do that," or "that sort of violates the laws of physics, doesn't it?" I get the response, "Alex, it's a gaaaaaaaame!"

Or, "... moooovie!" Or "teevee show!"

Writers generally care more about the reality the characters are living in than, say, directors, who want everything to look cool, or level designers, who want the player to be able to do cool stuff.

But here's why those arguments are sometimes worth having: reality is shaped weird. Most real things are not that simple, streamlined, concise or symmetrical.

So when we come upon a story that is too simple, too symmetrical, we are not sucked in as much as we are by a story that has a few weirdnesses. The latter feels more like reality.

That's how the audience doesn't know, but they know. If you have too many characters doing things because it simplifies the story, or that violate the internal rules of the universe that you have set up, or (in a naturalistic setting) that violate the rules of physics and biology, the audience may not know exactly what you've done wrong. But they will sense that the shape of your story is the shape of a made-up story, not a real one.

If you have the occasional character taking the story on a detour because dammit that's who they are, the audience feels more like they're in reality.

And that increases engagement, with that character, and with the story in general.

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

In honor of a great actor and director, two stories I've heard on the grapevine.

Clint bought the rights to UNFORGIVEN about ten years before he made the movie. He wanted to be old enough to play the part.

He’s finally ready to go into production. Has the writer, David Webb Peoples (BLADERUNNER) over to dinner. They chat and chat. David’s wondering when Clint is going to explain how he wants to change the script.

Dinner goes on and on. Finally, Peoples says something along the lines of, “So, what do you think you want to do with the script?" Because every director has the writer rewrite the script, if the writer is very lucky, or has his “guy” (it’s almost always a guy) rewrite the script. I was the director’s guy, for example, on BON COP / BAD COP.

Peoples is waiting for the shoe to drop.

Clint says, “Nope. It’s good,” and pours some more wine.

Shot the script word for word.

Had the self-confidence to know that the script was good. Didn’t need to mess with it just to make it his.

Second story.

Clint is shooting A PERFECT WORLD starring Kevin Costner, back when Costner was on top of the world.

First shot, Costner’s supposed to run up to a line of laundry, steal some clothes, and run off.(His character is on the run.)

They roll the first take. Costner runs up, steals the laundry, runs off.

Clint says, “Okay, next setup.”

Costner says, “Wait, what? I can do better.”

Clint tells the crew, “What are you guys all standing around for? I said next setup.”

Costner gets very put out. Goes to his trailer and slams the door.

Clint tells Costner’s stunt double, “This is your lucky day!” and proceeds to set up the next shot using the stunt guy.

Costner storms out of his trailer, and says “You can’t do this to me!”

Clint looks him in the eye and says, “Kevin, I think I’m the only guy in Hollywood who can do this to you.”

Monday, June 05, 2017

One of the diseases of videogames is quest-givers who ask you, a total stranger, to solve their problem. Most people don't trust total strangers enough to even tell them what their problem is. The exceptions would be people who desperately need someone, anyone to solve their problem, and are presumably asking everyone. E.g. the postings for Witcher jobs: if you have a dragon problem, you don't care who kills your dragon, or who knows that you have one.

One of the nice things about quests in We Happy Few is that quite a few of the townsfolk do, in fact, know the player characters. So right away it makes more sense if they ask for help.

There's a simple fix, though. Instead of having the quest-giver offer the quest and then offer a reward, give the player character a reason to know that the quest-giver can give that reward. Then if the player character asks, the quest-giver can say, "Well, I might do that for you, but first you have to do something for me." To me that feels more natural.

Monday, May 29, 2017

The other night at the bar, one of the company founders asked me to name one of the things I like most about the game. One of the things that came to mind is how we are telling the story of the world.

What we try to do in We Happy Few is “pull” narrative: we try to provoke the question in the player before we present the answer. I call it “pull” because the question pulls the player into interrogating his or her environment to find the answer.

Our narrative is “dirty.” Most of the stories we tell through lore and through encounters have relate at most tangentially with the player character’s overall goal. NPCs aren’t there to serve your story. They’re there to serve their stories; it’s only an accident that their story intersects with yours. When you meet them, they’re in the middle of something important to them, and they have somewhere else to be after meeting you.

To me, this feels more like real life. No one is on Earth to serve your life story. They are there to serve their own life story. Even your Mom, who loves you, is living her own story. It may be her goal to see that your life is a good one, but that is still her goal, not your (related) goal. To add to this notion, quite a few of our NPC stories intersect with each other. You are not the nexus of all that is interesting. Some NPCs hate each other. Some love each other. Some love and hate each other. Such is life.

In other words: we are hardwired to turn our experiences into story. Which means that, by giving the player chunks of narrative content that could add up to a story, we allow him or her to tell themselves their own story. To my mind, the Holy Grail of game storytelling is: get the player to tell the story, rather than telling the player the story.

The individual chunks of narrative need to be linear in order to bear meaning – Arthur’s story isn’t choose-your-own adventure. But I aim to give you spaces in between the cutscenes which you can fill in. I’m only showing you the peaks; you fill in the rest of the mountain.

Saturday, May 06, 2017

Q. I live in Montreal and I have no desire to move to Toronto (in part because I hate Toronto but mostly because I love Montreal).

I hear that!

Q. At this point my portfolio consists mostly of big-budget features, which have made the rounds in some of the American screenplay competitions. I'm trying to make sure that I'm on the right path.

Should I continue doing what I'm doing:

Writing feature specs, sending targeted queries to producers and agencies in LA and Toronto, until one of them lands me a sale or a job.

Or, seeing how Canada is mostly a TV industry (as far as writers go), would you recommend that I try writing some TV specs and pitching them to Toronto agencies instead (like your blog suggested). Just keep in mind that I frequently watch and study a lot more movies than I do television, and feature-writing has always been my primary interest. With that being said, if TV writing is the only way to make it down here, I am open to shifting my focus.

Honestly, I’d recommend you write games. You live in one of five world meccas for game development. Games hire writers all the time. I hear about game jobs pretty often.

Montreal is a backwater of a backwater for writing features. Canada barely has an English language movie business. (French is a different story obviously.)

TV writing is a better business but you can’t do it from Montreal. You have to be in Toronto. Ideally, you go to the CFC Prime Time program. Most of the graduates from there find something to do in the business, though not all writing, and there’s no guarantees.

Or go to LA if you want to work in the real business. This is the golden age of television writing. There are so many scripted series going into production these days.

Kids today mostly don’t want movies and they don’t even watch TV that much. They play games.

... I am not really sure how you get into writing games. There are people who have advice about that and I’ve blogged about it. But my own particular path depended a lot on having written a hit film, so it’s not an easy path to follow.

Thursday, March 23, 2017

We lost one of the best writers I know tonight. A writer, and a firebrand for writers. And a good friend. And a wit, and a style, and a voice. Damn it.

I met Denis McGrath on a plane to South Africa. We were parachuting in on a show where the previous writing team, who were on a plane going the other way, had not got along too well with the showrunner. When we got there, we had to retcon some sort of sense out of the episodes that had been shot, and then rewrite the next script literally over the course of 24 hours.

We got along like gangbusters. Denis was a New York native who'd moved to Toronto as a kid. He was big, and he was loud, and he was funny, and he was whip smart. He liked to complain. He was generous. He cared. He loved stories. We spent a lot of time breaking story above a nice restaurant, having them bring us takeout on actual plates, since we were right upstairs. We decided his talk show would be called, "Here's Why I Hate That."

A couple years later, Denis and I instigated the Writer Mafia Party At TIFF, which became an annual event for a decade. Starting at The Paddock and moving to Czehoski, it was the antidote to all the producer parties at the Toronto International Film Festival. No free drinks, but your friends were there. Like him, it was big, it was loud, it was fun, it was packed to the gills with brains and creativity.

He would hold court at the Writer Mafia Party. He did not get around easily, so friends would come to him, and bask in him. He always had a bunch of Ryerson kids around him who were starting to break in. He was one of the top television writers in Canada, but he also taught, because he didn't want to keep it all for himself. He said in every class there was one kid you knew was going to do it. That was my experience too. You really taught the class for that one kid that had it.

He had a million friends; he had a few bosom buddies who went back to his high school days. But he always made time for me when I showed up in town.

He was a hell of a writer. He was certainly one of the best television writers in Canada. When, as a juror for the WGC awards, I read a script that really popped, more than once it turned out to be Denis's. I remember an episode of The Border where every act out not only amped the story out, it made you have to rethink everything you'd seen up to then.

He blogged passionately. He got himself in trouble calling a certain very powerful individual a fatuous gasbag, someone who could easily reach out and discourage people from hiring him. He ranted about Canadian networks that refused to believe in Canadian shows, always trying to get permission to stop funding them, even though shows like Corner Gas and Durham County were successful and good. He was a permanent fixture in the Writer's Guild of Canada, a long time counsellor for Ontario, and a member of the negotiating committee. I'm glad I was not one of the producers on the other side. He was not afraid to call shenanigans when he saw them.

Sunday, March 19, 2017

I'm playing a couple of new games, and they have amazing gameplay. But something's missing for me with their characters.

Now, granted, you can have a pretty good game without strong characterization. A game can be superfun without it. But it can't make you care about the characters. It can't move you.

I have a long-running beef about many fantasy and SF and historical games. Characters are defined primarily by their situations.

Say, for example, you're an outcast. Members of the Tribe are mean to you. The character you play is, naturally, spunky, and doesn't let the meanies get her down.

But suppose you were a Jew in 1930s Germany, or a Muslim or a trans person in South Carolina now. You do not fit in; some people are mean to you.

But they are mean to different degrees and in different ways. Some will mock you. Some will hit you. Some will pretend you don't exist, because they're not fundamentally mean and they're embarrassed about it.

Some will be mean if other people are around, but nice to you if other people are not.

We expect characters from the 20th and 21st centuries to be people with personalities. Their attitudes are colored by their situation; they're taught to react to you a certain way. But some people are angry and just looking for someone to take it out on. For some, duty is important and they might hurt you but only because they think they're supposed to; it's not personal. People are different.

I miss that in a lot of fantasy and historical and sf games.

I can't wait for the cave man game where you meet a Neanderthal, and he's a bit of a joker, but actually, you realize, actually kind of an asshole.

People also have their own stories going on. I can't wait till I'm playing a game and I meet a member of the Other Tribe, and she's really upset about something that just happened (like she just broke up with her boyfriend) and meeting me is not the most important thing in her day, I'm just a weird happenstance.

In A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, the animals are people. When you meet Eeyore, he's a self-pitying mope. In fact, he is such a specific self-pitying mope that I feel positive that, if I'd gone to a garden party at A. A. Milne's house, I'd have been able to figure out which of his friends A. A. was making fun of.

So if there are three kids from the Tribe harassing the playing in a prehistoric or post-Apocalyptic game, then maybe one of them is really intent on hurting you, and obviously angry at your very existence. But a second kid is trying to pull him away because she was enjoying the game they were playing and you're nothing to her. And another is obvious upset at what the first one is doing, but doesn't want to rock the boat.

Just because you're writing historical or pre-historic characters doesn't mean you can't write people. Modern homo sapiens — meaning humans who you could dress up and put in the subway and they'd look completely normal — have been around for at least a hundred thousand years. A hundred thousand years ago they probably believed the mountain was a god and the stream was a god too and so forth. But don't tell me that some of them weren't really nice people, and some of them were jerks, and some of them you had to catch on a good day, and some of them were egotistical. Some of them wanted to be chief of the tribe, and some just wanted to get with the ladies or the men, and some were no use for anything but okay in a pinch, and some were smart and clever and useless in a fight.

And I guarantee you some would not listen to anybody, and some could make you feel good when you fell on your face, and some just made you feel stupid, and the kids didn't listen to their elders as much as the elders wanted, because people have been complaining about that at least since the invention of writing.

(Seriously, we have texts from the Romans and even the ancient Egyptians saying, basically, "Kids these days, amirite?")

When you're writing aliens, other species, people from other times and places, try writing them like specific people that you know. Write them so specifically that your friends will recognize them. Give them the flaws of the people you're basing them on.

Monday, March 13, 2017

Would you be willing to read what I have done so far and, in addition, give me some advice about getting it in the hands of a producer?

I used to do that, for a fee, but I don't do that any more, except for friends.

Certainly, if you assist me, I would not mind at all sharing proceeds with you.

What you are looking for is an agent. An agent finds a producer to pay you, and takes 10%.

I am working to get the synopsis for my screenplay exactly right. It took me a month to get the perfect log line.

Good! Most people don't spend enough time on their hook. They just charge ahead and write the script. Then they write the query letter. I've critiqued query letters in the past, for a fee, and about half the time, as I'm trying to improve the query, I can easily think of a better concept. Of course by then the script is written and nobody wants to rip up their script and write a better one.

Professionals do it all the time. They don't want to, but they do.

You will see that I am an accomplished writer. In fact, my mantra is that I steadfastly refuse to start a sentence with 'the', a habit left over from the promise of at least a grade of 75% in English Literature if a student submitted material exclusively without ever starting a sentence with 'the'.

Sunday, March 12, 2017

Q. I show a female cop near the beginning of my script, but she doesn't speak.

As I start Act II, I introduce an old women, who is really the cop, in makeup prosthetics to look like an old woman.

Do I tell the reader that the cop and the old woman are one and the same? Or do I let the reader know when everyone else finds out?

A friend of mine says “the director and the crew need to know right away.”

A. They will, but you’re not writing a shooting script. You’re writing a selling script. A selling script should read the way you want the audience to experience the movie.

Later on, should your script go into production, you’ll make everything clear; but in a selling script, secrets should remain secrets until they’re revealed.

You can, if you want, write something like “We’ll see her again,” to let us know to pay attention to this particular cop; it’s the equivalent of the camera dwelling on this particular cop for just long enough that we know we should remember her later.

Actually, why doesn't she speak? What's the point of introducing her at all if we're not going to notice her?

Another question: is she the main character? If so, maybe we should know she's in disguise. If the main character knows critical things we don't know, it alienates us from him or her. You can do it, but we won't identify with him or her as much.

Friday, March 03, 2017

We have now, finally, at the last minute, got everything recorded for this sprint, including at least seven little old ladies for Hoard House. Guess how many actors? Have a listen when the update comes and tell me how many you think there are.

As I mentioned last week, I did a massive casting session for a character named Ed MacMillan, affectionately known around the office as Meat Boy. (Obviously he is in no way an homage to anyone associated with the game Super Meat Boy.)

I found an amazing actor, Joe Sims, who has won all sorts of awards for his radio work.

(I didn’t know he’d won awards until we cast him. I generally ignore CVs when I’m casting voices. It takes much less time to listen to a voice reel and decide whether the actor is inhabiting the roles he plays.)

Joe will break your heart, I hope, as Meat Boy. He’s also assorted bookies, bobbies, lads and soldiers. We had fun.

In other news, affordances.

Affordances is a fancy word for “things look like you’re supposed to use them a certain way.” I read a great book by Don Norman called The Design of Everyday Things. It’s about doors that you can’t figure out whether to push or pull on them, and how to design things so they’re intuitive. It’s actually super helpful for game design. You might dig it.

Well, we put some phone booths in the game, because, you know, iconic. Can’t have Britain without red telephone boxes.

But then you guys said, “We want to pick up the phones and hear something.”

So we put some voices on the phone. And a baseball game between the Dublin Dukes and the New York Yankees.

But then you guys said, “There’s voices, but there’s no gameplay.” Gosh, you people are demanding.

So Lisa and I came up with a story and some gameplay for the phone booths. It won’t be in this update, but maybe it will be in the next. So I hope y’all feel the love.

Friday, February 24, 2017

I was not satisfied with what we were able to do with one particular character in a recording session with an otherwise wonderful voice actor. Our voice actor is very good at accents, but this is a fairly hard role — a developmentally disabled adult who has to break your heart.

So I fired off a casting call to the UK.

Saying “developmentally disabled character” to the entire pool of agents in the UK is a little bit of waving a red flag in front of the Running of the Bulls. Playing disabled is an artistic challenge, so it shows your acting chops. The clip will almost certainly go on your reel. I got 80 submissions in about three hours late on a Thursday afternoon.

So I got to wade through 80 submissions. One weird thing about voice character submissions is the headshots. They send me headshots. Why would I care about headshots? I don’t care what the actor looks like. All right, it’s nice that Alex Wyndham could actually pass for Arthur if we did the movie, but he could look like Shirley Temple for all I care. When we do the recording sessions, we don’t have the camera on, so I literally do not know what half of my actors look like.

I winnow those 80 submissions to 9 I’d like to hear from; plus I go through my last casting call and ping the agents whose clients were great but not right for those roles. The actors will record an MP3, and a dozen actors will come down to three or four. I’ll audition those guys on the phone.

The lucky actor — by “lucky” I mean “probably spent a decade or two painstakingly learning how to turn his talent into craft” — then gets to record this one particular part for about fifteen minutes, plus a bunch of other stuff for forty-five minutes. And the scene will play for about a minute and a half in the game.

It is a ridiculous amount of work for a role you’re going to see on screen in the first playthrough for 90 seconds. This is why recording voice actors is expensive even for short recordings - you’re not paying for 15 minutes of work, you’re paying for the lifetime of experience that is needed to deliver a great 15 minutes of work.

But if those two minutes break your heart, then they add meaning to the hour or two of gameplay following that encounter. They show us a side of Arthur we wouldn’t know without them. So you care.

I mean, that’s the point of the narrative, after all: to make you care.

Monday, February 20, 2017

Thursday, February 16, 2017

Q. I'm a novelist who is expanding my career to include screenwriting.

I've gotten many views on Inktip. One producer contacted me to ask if I would add an angel to to script, turn it into a feature film script and then tone it down to family friendly.

I asked if we could chat by phone. We had a good rapport and I enjoyed hearing her ideas. I developed a new synopsis, tweaked it after several email exchanges until she said that she loved it.

I waited a few days. Then I emailed to ask what she would like to do next. I had asked her about her budget earlier and she didn't want to discuss money.

Warning, Will Robinson. Danger, danger. A producer who does not want to discuss money at this point is almost certainly wasting your time. Real producers understand that they have to pay money to get what they want creatively. Indeed, that is literally the job description of a producer. Producers find money in order to move their creative projects forward.

A producer that won't put money down either doesn't believe in the project, not really, or they don't have the ability to bring money, in which case, flee.

After 25 years writing for major publishers, I've never been told not to ask about money. She just emailed me to ask me about the changes to the script. I haven't added those changes to the script because the changes are major, would certainly surprise the readers who followed the book series, and I'm not sure I want to write a screenplay with no budget in mind. I've never worked gratis.

Should I write a screenplay for her without knowing the budget, or if she has the funds to pay me?

That would be "no."

She has, at this point, read a script, made notes, and read a synopsis. She's invested, at most, two hours in your project. You've probably invested several days to a week.

It costs nothing for a producer to say, "Hey, this would be great if it were set in a PT boat in the South Pacific in 1943." It costs you time to rewrite. At the end of all that time, the producer can say, "Y'know what... never mind." You're stuck with a version of your script that you don't necessarily believe in.

If someone gives you notes that make your script better, there's nothing wrong with taking those notes. Even if the producer doesn't want the script afterwards, you still have a better script.

"Put not your trust in princes," as the Bible says. Assume that some portion of whatever a producer says is optimism, and another portion is fairy tales. The money is proof that the producer is taking your project seriously, and is a serious producer.

(By the way, no, you don't ask about money. Your agent does. That is literally her job description.)

Saturday, February 04, 2017

Lisa's rebreaking the story for a script she's rewriting. She's been wracking her brain on the third act action sequences. The monkeys never seem to be in the right place.

Last night I suggested she think about "what is your hero's greatest fear? The action sequence is where she confronts and surmounts it."

She sort of lit up and disappeared into her writer's brain, and this morning told me, "I've got the whole thing."

It's not about the monkeys. It's never about the monkeys.

A great third act action sequence is, of course, your biggest spectacle. In a great script, it is also where the hero completes his or her dramatic journey. Luke Skywalker's run at the Death Star is not really about where the X-wings go. It is about Luke surrendering to the Force and taking the path to becoming a Jedi like his father.

There are plenty of movies where the third act action sequence is not about the hero achieving his or her destiny, or completing his or her journey. The action is about the hero accomplishing his external goal. However, they are less satisfying, I find, than movies in which the action sequence is not only the physical resolution, but the dramatic resolution.

What does your hero have to do in order to complete his or her journey?

Actually, this is true of all action sequences, in the broadest sense. A sex scene should never be about the sex (unless you're writing a porno, obviously). A sex scene should be a dialog scene without words, where the characters are using sex to express their feelings about each other. They each want something, there's tension, will they get it? Yes, they do. Or no, they don't.

(It's critical to any scene, including a sex scene, or any other kind of action scene, that they won't get what they want.)

Ideally, a gun battle in a John Woo movie, a duet in an opera, a pas de deux in a ballet, can and should have a dramatic question at its heart.

Or, for that matter, a boss battle in a video game, though it may be some time before we realize this.

Friday, January 27, 2017

This past two weeks, I wrote a pirate into the pub, singing a sea shanty. I’ve always wanted to put “The Eddystone Light” into something or other. Yo ho ho, the wind blows free! O for the life of the rolling sea.

I also recorded our Arthur, Alex Wyndham, and She Who Must Not Be Named, and I’ve edited most of the new lines into the cinematic audio.

It’s an interesting challenge rewriting the scenes so they convey the new information without requiring new choreography. In a movie, where the camera is third person, it’s easy to expand a scene, because the camera keeps cutting. In first person cinematics, you would have to create animation that would take the characters from position A, to do new things, and then back to exactly position A. So I try to avoid changing the timing of the scene – I try to make the new words fit as closely as possible to where the old words lived, or at least take up the same amount of time, so I don’t bump other lines that are still working.

Shouldn’t we have made these changes before the animators went to work? Sure. But it’s very hard to read a script, and still fairly hard to evaluate an audio track. Sometimes people don’t spot things until they actually see them.

More importantly, when you spend three years working on a story, you spot weaknesses in it that were not immediately apparent. Hopefully, you’ve left some room in the budget for fixing them.

On the other hand, because it’s not a movie, it’s a game, we can keep making improvements. A while ago we added an epilog for the first few characters. This week G asked us to find a way to tie all the stories together thematically at the end, which makes the game more coherent narratively. It also gives a new mandate to the epilog. So, we are rewriting the epilog to incorporate some ideas.

Also, we continue to improve the ending of the playthrough for SWMNBN. I think we’re on version 5 or 6. The first one was good, but too short to convey the catharsis we need. So each time we’ve been going deeper while, I hope, keeping to the essentials of the story.

And ... I’ve just about got all the dialog written for this sprint, which leaves me some time to play the game! So yay for that.

Monday, January 23, 2017

Q. Lately I’ve heard that very few agents will take you seriously if you have less than 5 scripts, so before I even write the query, I wanted to know if I should do it one query per script? Or?

I have not heard anything about five scripts. Last I heard is that agents want one awesome spec (of a running show) and one awesome spec pilot (for your own show). One speaks to the ability to write in someone else’s voice, the other speaks to your own creativity and voice.

Of course my info could be out of date. I've had the same agency for ten years. Best way to get current info is to call up some agents and ask their assistants, "What do you guys want these days?" It's also a good idea to ask, "What are people speccing these days?" They'll tell you.

Generally you end up with five or more scripts as your writing gets better and as your specs age out. Your spec ages out when the show gets cancelled, or people get sick of reading specs from that show. Your spec pilot ages out when someone greenlights a show with something close to your show's premise.

When that happens, don't feel so bad. It means you were on the right track. You're in the Zeitgeist.

Also, take a look at the show that was greenlit. How was it different than yours? Was it more commercial? Sometimes it got greenlit just because the showrunner is a proven quantity, but often you can learn something.

So, if you’re looking for TV agent, it probably wouldn’t hurt to say “here’s my spec pilot with an awesome hook, and of course I also have a spec for .”

Friday, January 20, 2017

I have an interesting relationship with the designers. They are instinctively concerned with “what does the player want to do?” As the narrative guy, however, it’s my job to ask, “Why does Arthur want to do this?”

For example, let’s suppose Arthur discovers that a delivery boy is late. The player gets an objective to find out why he is late.

However, why should Arthur care whether a delivery boy is late? “Because the player got an objective” is not an answer. Nor is “because it is going to set him off on an adventure”; he doesn’t know that. Most people Arthur knows are forgetful; aren’t people late all the time?

So, I’m the pain in the ass guy who complicates the job of designing levels by asking why the player character wants to do what the player wants to do.

So, first, I thought, maybe this delivery boy is never late. Okay, that’s helpful. But still, why should Arthur care?

I asked David. David said, “Maybe he knows him.”

So I thought, of course. The delivery boy was Arthur’s brother’s only real friend in school. Arthur’s goal in the game is to find Percy because he promised he’d take care of him. If he can help the delivery boy, he can accomplish a shadow of that goal.

Now the mission is personal. Note that it has not changed at all in design, only in meaning. And that changed meaning gave us an interesting way to resolve the encounter, which helps make the encounter even deeper and more personal. But you’ll have to play the encounter to find out how.

When I wrote sonnets back in university, I noticed that fitting a meter and rhyme scheme forced me to be more inventive with my language than writing in free verse did. Necessity is the mother of invention. Because our designers believe in our narrative, they don’t have total freedom. But in return, we discover new things about our world every time design crashes into narrative.

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

To expand just a little on that last little bit... you have to listen to your gut. When the actor is really inhabiting his character, I feel it. The studio disappears for a moment and the character is there. It's a thrilling moment. When the actor is not inhabiting the role, I don't feel it. Part of the skill of directing is learning not to pretend you feel it when you don't.

Hearing what you're actually hearing, as opposed to what you want to hear, or what you fear hearing, is something children and dogs do instinctively, and teenagers and adults unlearn, and artists have to learn again. You have to remember to ask yourself, sometimes, "Did I really believe that?"

The other side of directing is figuring out what words to give the actor to help him or her get from where he or she is to where I want them to go. Sometimes it's just calling shenanigans on the delivery. "I didn't really believe that."

Or, with a trained actor, you can often shorthand it. You can say, "More anguish," knowing they have the tools (the "method") to get there on their own.

But best practices is giving the actor an adjustment in the form of an imaginative circumstance. I don't think I ever say, "Louder." Instead I say, "Okay, now project it a bit more, as if the person you're talking to is on the other side of the street." Or, “You need help, and there’s no one around!”

"Okay, but now, as if you know the person you're talking to. You're not only betrayed, you've been betrayed by your best friend."

"As if" are the most important two words in the director's toolkit. (See John Badham’s book on directing, I’ll Be In My Trailer.)

I can give a line reading, but when the actor is mimicking my delivery, it almost always comes out sounding hollow. I then have to say, “Okay, now make it your own.” If I have to give a line reading, I’ll try to use a paraphrase of the line rather than the words of the line themselves, and I won’t use a British accent; I’m trying to convey the emotion, not the delivery.

A believable performance isn't the same as a "realistic" performance. It's the emotional truth that carries the line. A big, stagey but emotionally truthful performance is believable. (I believe it's often called "opera.") A performance that mimics what a real person does, but doesn't convey the emotion behind it, won't convince the audience.

When the actor inhabits the character, it's amazing. A line you wrote fifteen minutes ago can catch you off guard and make you laugh as if you just heard it for the first time. When I laugh, I know the line's a keeper.

Wednesday, January 04, 2017

I read Michael Lewis’s book The Undoing Project, about two scientists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who investigated just how irrational people are.

For example, “anchoring.” If you have people roll dice to get a random number between 1 and 100, and then you ask them to estimate the number of countries in the United Nations, or the number of languages spoken in India, or anything else they aren’t sure of, those who rolled higher numbers will guess higher than the ones who rolled lower numbers. They’ve been primed to think of higher numbers.

Which is sort of interesting, but one valuable takeaway had nothing to do with their research. When Tversky listened to scientific lectures he didn’t agree with, rather than figuring out how to shoot them down, he asked himself: what is this true of?

This parallels my acting teacher Joanne Baron, who said that when you get feedback, find the truth in it.

It’s easy to find something to disagree with. But if someone gives you feedback, or a scientist gives a lecture, then there is probably some truth to it. You will often get more benefit from figuring out in what way is this true or what part of this is true than in figuring out why it’s wrong.

We have a gal in our office who often disagrees with people. She has a habit of finding something in what they're saying that is easy to dispute, rather than finding the thing that makes sense, and then expanding on it.

Anyone who’s ever argued with a teenager knows that if the kid can find something, anything that’s wrong in anything you say, the kid will feel entitled to reject everything you’re saying.

A cardinal rule of improvisation goes: yes, and. In improv, you’re not allowed to disagree. If the actor you’re with says “I’m a pineapple,” then you can’t say, “No, you’re not.” That would kill the improv. You can say, “And I’m a grocer” or “and I’m an orange” or “and I’m a pineapple fetishist.”

As a corollary, when you are proposing a new idea, there is something to be said for couching it in terms that make it hard to pick apart.

See, I just did it. I didn’t say, “always couch it in terms....” I said, “there is something to be said for couching it in terms....” If I said "always," you might well be tempted to construct a scenario in which my advice would be wrong.

When arguing with our former teenager, I always made a point of phrasing criticism so broadly that he couldn’t pick holes in how I phrased it. Rather than saying, “You never clean up your room,” which would enable him to bring up the one time he did, I’d say, “You’re not exactly a neatnik, are you?” It conveys more or less the same message, but – being as he was not exactly a neatnik – he couldn’t fixate on the wording. He had to confront the message. Or to put it another way, I made it easier for him to absorb the truth in the message.

He never did clean his room, of course. But I got my message across, at least.

Using words “many of” rather than “most of” or “all of” changes the focus from “exactly what percentage are we talking about” to whatever the issue that is actually bothering you.
“Half the NPCs sound like zombies” invites a discussion of whether it’s half or some other number. “Many of the NPCs sound like zombies” focuses on the zombiness of the NPCs.

Even better, use sentences that begin with some form of “I.” “To me, a lot of these NPCs sound like zombies.” It is very hard for you to argue with me about how they sound to me. (Note that I didn’t say it’s impossible. That’s inviting an argument.)

Sunday, December 04, 2016

All of us creative types have things we're naturally good at, and things we've learned to do, and things we aren't that good at (yet). This creates a creative trap: when approaching a project, we often work on the part we understand best — the part that scares us least.

So if you're good at plot, you write the plot first, and then fill in the characters later. If you're good at characters, you write up the characters and then feel your way towards a plot.

In game design, there's a tendency to work on the parts of the game that are "well understood," whether those are combat mechanics, or environment, or story, or whatever.

I worked on a game whose entire success hinged on whether some very advanced AI tech would work. The studio, however, hired a slew of people to build environments and animations.

I understand the impulse. You want to have something to show for it. If you're working on a very advanced, invisible back end, what can you show your investors? So you make some lovely environments. Also, it's relatively easy to hire people who can make lovely environments — compared to people who can make an expert system based on new research.

Of course, if you know what you're doing, it could be a valid decision to work on well-understood parts of the game, if you know in advance that they're going to take a long time to hone. Well-understood doesn't mean simple or fast, it just means you know the processes you're going to use. When we started with combat, it had something to do with how finicky combat is to implement convincingly.

Likewise, if you're a character-based writer and you simply have to inhabit the characters before you can move on to the plot, then it might be crucial to your own creative process that you start with the characters.

But working on the part that you feel comfortable with can become a trap.

By working on the parts that you're comfortable with, you necessarily reduce your options on the part that scares you.

Every creative choice you make on a project takes away some future choices. If I set a project in Germany in 1933, then it is very hard to choose a Mongolian steppe warrior as my main character. If I did set a project in Germany in 1933, and chose a Mongolian steppe warrior as my main character, then I pretty much have to tell a science fiction story.

So if you make a bunch of decisions on the easy stuff, you're restricting your range of choices for the hard stuff. That's bass ackwards. You want as much room as possible when you're doing the hard stuff, since you can probably handle a restricted range of choices on the easy stuff.

In other words, don't paint yourself into a corner on the easy stuff.

What happens if you do paint yourself into a corner on the easy stuff is either (a) you accept a poor solution on the hard stuff, because you don't see any good way to do it; or (b) you rip up a bunch of stuff that was working, because otherwise you can't make the hard stuff work.

In game development, if your game hangs on a fresh new gameplay mechanic, then try to get that working before you put any environments into the game. Spearhead, for example, created a three-on-three science fiction soccer game. The first playable build was pretty much dots chasing another dot around a grey box; but the fun was already there.

In screenplay writing, if you're weak on characters, then consider writing only the faintest of sketchiest of plot outlines, and then really spending some time thinking about what characters could most interestingly inhabit that plot — as opposed to working out a really detailed plot and then trying to shoehorn some characters into it.

Or, if you're good on characters but weak on plot, take some relatively simple characters, and build a fairly detailed, surprising-yet-inevitable plot around them before you move to fleshing them out.

You get several benefits from this. One, you develop your creative muscles. If you are good at situps but bad at pushups, and you do a bunch of pushups, you will have stronger biceps, and now you can do both pushups and situps.

Two, your creative project is strong both in the area you find hard and the area you find easy, instead of just in the area you find easy.

Three, when you're working on stuff that scares you, you will often make more interesting choices than you would if you were working on stuff you understand well. Creativity is usually a dance between structure and improvisation. If you force yourself to improvise, you'll come up with stuff you might not otherwise have thought of.

Four, if you work on the hard stuff first, and utterly fail, you haven't wasted any time on the easy stuff. The finicky AI tech never really worked, and the studio was left with a whole bunch of bespoke environments and animations. If you really hate writing a character based screenplay, then after you've banged some characters around for a few weeks, you might just toss the project and go write some hook-driven action thriller where you can get away with snappy banter in the place of actual characterization. If you really cannot write an interesting plot, then you'll find that out when you attempt to plot out your suspense thriller, and you can chuck it and go write that achingly personal coming of age story.

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Q. I just picked up my first "LA" option for a short story I wrote. I'll be getting 2% net if it gets made. Now I've read articles on net versus gross in the industry and my agent ways I should just be happy at this stage of my career that it was picked up...... so of course I signed. However as a writer moving forward is there anything else I should be aware of or ask for that doesn't normally fall within the option contract?

The standard definition of net profits is "you don't see any profits." So whether you get 2% of nothing or 5% of nothing is unimportant. On the other hand as a newbie you're not going to get gross. It's pretty rare for even a veteran writer to get gross participation. If the movie is a hit, you won't get more cash from the movie, but you will get asked to write other people's movies at a much better salary.

I like to ask for the right of first refusal (ROFR) to write sequels, prequels and spin-offs, as well as TV pilots. Sometimes that turns into ROFR provided that I get a credit on the script. (No one can guarantee I get a credit because it's arbitrated by the Guild.)

If they're optioning your story or novel, you can often ask for ROFR to write the initial script. Very likely they will take it away from you after the first draft, but you'll get a screenwriting credit on the movie because when you adapted the script you brought in the plot and the characters. If you don't write the first draft, the most you'd get would be a "Based on a short story by" credit.

When I'm optioning a script, I like to ask for a production bonus based on the budget of the film. The WGC, but not the WGA, has this in the standard contract. Bear in mind the minimum scale percentage is a floor, not a cap, so you can negotiate more, if they really want the script. The nice thing about a percentage is that the producer can't really plead poverty. "But our budget is tiny." "No problem, then I get 2.5% of tiny."

Bear in mind anything that looks like "Writer will be consulted" bla bla bla is meaningless and unenforceable. "What do you think." "It sucks because this this and this." "Thanks, you've been consulted." Likewise anything that looks like "Writer will be considered." "What do you think about Joe?" "That guy? F*&& him." You've been considered.

Remember, you can insist on any contractual term, so long as you're willing to walk away. I've heard that Sylvester Stallone turned down $200,000 for the script to Rocky, because they wouldn't agree for him to star in it. He was broke at the time. Later, someone else bought the script for scale, but with him to star in it.

You could probably tell that story about a thousand other guys who never sold their script to anyone because they insisted on starring in it.

By the same token, if you're not willing to walk away, it's hard to get anything. You don't get the contract you deserve, you get the contract you negotiate.

99% of the time it's better to have an agent negotiate for you. But you don't want to leave the negotiating to the agent. You want them to be the face of the negotiation, but ultimately you have to tell them what your dealbreakers are and how hard to haggle, and how upset you'll be if they don't make a deal.

Friday, November 25, 2016

We had an interesting office conversation today, about the late comedian/troll Andy Kaufman, which then drifted into whether sexist and racist jokes are okay. I don't appreciate them. One of the women in the office said she enjoys them because "it's just a joke."

But why do we tell jokes? Jokes are meant to make us uncomfortable in some way. We laugh when something goes wrong. A joke is always a setup that is derailed.

There are absurdist jokes, of course, that are just all about the derail:

"I went to a restaurant that serves 'breakfast anytime.' So I asked for French toast in the Renaissance." -- Stephen Wright

Our expectations are foiled, and we laugh out of the cognitive dissonance.

But most jokes are at someone's expense. "Tragedy," as Mel Brooks said, "is I stub my toe. Comedy is you die." For example:

My lover's been bugging me for the key to my apartment… finally I said, 'No, I'll let you out when I'm ready.' -- Heidi Foss

To dissect my friend Heidi's joke a bit, the setup is the assumed attempt on the part of the lover to have a closer relationship. The derail is that the lover is actually imprisoned. Note that the joke works because it's sort of horrifying. ("When I'm ready" is a nice touch because it mirrors the normal conversation: 'I'm not ready' for a closer relationship.)

Stereotype jokes are at the expense of a whole group of people:

Q. How many Harvard students does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A. Just one. He stands on the ladder, and the whole world revolves around him.

The point of the joke is that Harvard students are conceited. Here's another:

Two blondes were talking. "Last year," one said, "I slept with two Brazilian guys."
"Oh my God!" said the other. "How many is a 'brazilian'"?

The point of the joke is that blonde women are stupid. Oh, and slutty.

So why do I think it's not okay to tell racist or sexist jokes? Because the point of a joke about a stereotype is that it's only funny if the listener believes that the stereotype is, in some way, true. Change one word in the joke:

Q. How many Columbia students does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A. Just one. He stands on the ladder, and the whole world revolves around him.

That joke isn't funny, because almost no one thinks that Columbia students are particularly conceited.

Two Canadians were talking. "Last year," one said, "I slept with two Brazilian guys."
"Oh my God!" said the other. "How many is a 'brazilian'"?

What? Huh? Not funny. No one thinks Canadians are particularly dumb.

Now, jokes at the expense of Harvard students aren't particularly awful. Harvard students are on top of the academic heap. So the joke is sort of "telling truth to power." But jokes at the expense of blondes are not completely innocent. If I tell a blonde joke, I'm saying that, to some extent, the intelligence of women with blonde hair is suspect.

"But it's just a joke." Well, nothing is "just" a joke. If people didn't already suspect blondes of being dumb, the joke wouldn't land.

Now, there are stereotypes that are hurtful, and stereotypes nobody really minds:

Q. How many New Yorkers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A. None of your fucking business!

Most New Yorkers will laugh at that joke, because they'd agree that New Yorkers are brusque.

Q. How many Zen Buddhists does it take to screw in a lighbulb.
A. Three.

What? Oh. Zen Buddhists are inscrutable. Right.

But then we get into jokes based on not so innocent stereotypes. For example, jokes about how stingy [Hittites] are. [Hittites] don't find them funny, because they don't see themselves in them. And, the stereotype of [Hittites] as being stingy is part of a whole package of anti-Semitism that, in the middle of the last century, ended up in homicidal violence.

Similarly, jokes about how lazy [Sumerians] are, or how dishonest [Assyrians] are, are part of a whole package of racism that ends up with unarmed [Sumerians] being shot by cops, and candidates accusing [Assyrians] of being rapists and murderers that should be kept out of the country.

The point is: when you tell a joke based on a nasty stereotype, you are saying the stereotype is, in some way, true. Nothing is ever "just" a joke. By making a joke, the teller is saying that the stereotype is in some way true.

And by laughing at it, you are agreeing.

In fact, the whole reason for these jokes is so that the teller can put down a group of people and get away with it; and the listener can buy into the putdown and get away with it. But in this case somebody's not telling truth to power; they're telling lies, and they're punching down.

Of course, it's impossible to dissect racist or sexist humor without sounding terribly unfunny, like you "don't get the joke":

Q. How many militant feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A. THAT'S NOT FUNNY.

But jokes have power. We wouldn't tell jokes if they didn't. Jokes are how we allow ourselves to communicate truths that can't be communicated openly. That's why traditionally the court jester is the only person who's allowed to confront the King; he's allowed that privilege because his jokes are deniable. That's why, in dictatorships, you can go to prison for telling a joke at the expense of the dictator. That's why some cartoons making fun of Mohammed triggered riots.

Jokes based on false stereotypes have the parallel power that they can communicate a lie that no one dares communicate openly any more. The reason some white people tell jokes about lazy [Sumerians] is because they don't dare say things like, "Well, everyone knows how lazy [Sumerians] are." But turn it into a joke, and "it's just a joke," and you get away with it. And they are all the more hurtful because the target is supposed to laugh them off. So the target has no recourse, unless they're witty enough to craft a good comeback.

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

...'s talk about Dynamic Stories at MIGS. These are my notes as I wrote them up for my Compulsion Games teammates... The complete powerpoint is on Richard's site

Dynamic Story = Story that is not the same every time you play the game.

Why good? Replayability. Especially these days when players stream, it’s boring if all the streams are of the same stuff.

Types of dynamic story:

a. Explorable story space

What we’re doing in WHF and what most AAA games do these days: bits of narrative that you discover wandering around. Hopefully there’s enough that few players discover all of it.

Doesn’t have to mean environmental narrative. Her Story allows you discover bits of video through a text parser. You never actually go anywhere.

b. Open ended story

Give the player enough bits of a story that s/he can find his/her own meaning in it, but not so much that you force the player into your interpretation. One player may come away with a very different experience than another.

c. Reacting to player actions

Branching story trees. Generally, game devs stay away from branching trees because they get crazy fast. Trust me on this one. 31 endings on Stories: The Path of Destinies. (Which, hey! Won Best Indie and Best PC Game at the Canadian Video Game Awards last night.)

So often you get a series of choices, but really it’s just one choice repeated: Mass Effect's Paragon/Renegade. Bioshock's Harvest/Rescue.

Or, choices, but only some of which change the story, and then only change a little bit of the story: Walking Dead.

d. Shifting story elements

Procedurally generated story. In Richard’s game, The Church in the Darkness, you are there to rescue someone from a cult. Sometimes the cult is a suicide Jim-Jones-style cult. However, sometimes, it’s just a bunch of hippies who want to be left alone. The Blade Runner game changed who was a replicant from playthrough to playthrough. In both examples, the payoff is you Actually Have to Pay Attention to the story around you. If it turns out that in the story they're just nice hippies, or humans, you're not supposed to go shooting them.

e. Character Simulation

The Sims. The Civilization franchise. Characters have personalities and react to your actions according to them. Faction-based systems: characters will react differently to your dwarf rogue depending on how they feel about dwarves and/or rogues, and how nice you’ve been to their friends.

The player here is choosing what story s/he wants to be part of.

f. Drama Management

Here Richard’s talking about games like Façade that try to make a story out of whatever it is you are doing. Shadow of Mordor’s nemesis system turns an NPC into your nemesis if he’s killed you before.

Wot I Thought

The Holy Grail of game narrative is emergent narrative. Emergent gameplay is when you design systems the players can use in ways the developers did not plan for, e.g. rocket jumping.

Most of the dynamic storytelling methods listed are not emergent. The Shadow of Mordor people like to claim that SoM’s nemesis stories are emergent, but someone had to write and record all the nasty things the orcs say to you when you come back from the dead, or they do.

On Stories: TpoD I pitched the idea of a sort of Collectible Card Game or faction-based narrative. I.e. NPCs have a basic reaction to you, which changes according to what you do with other NPCs. So if you kill someone’s brother, they will no longer sell you a sword, but they might fight you. If you marry their brother, they might tell you where some loot is.

This is not emergent narrative, either. It feels more like it, because you discover the story branches according to your own wanderings through the game. But someone has to write each branch of each NPC’s story tree.

(In the end we just went with a straight ahead story tree for Stories: TpoD. Nothing wrong with a story tree, they’re just hard to write so every path feels like a good story, in which the seeds of the ending are in the beginning. And they’re a lot of work.)

To make really emergent narrative, you’d have to create narrative building blocks that players can arrange in different ways.

Say you have one building block: dude’s getting a divorce.
Second building block: dude’s sleeping with someone who’s not his wife.

Both of these are narratively fraught events, but they have a different meaning, and tell a different story depending on their arrangement.

If you see:

dude sleeping around -> getting a divorce

Then the player probably interpolates the story “he cheated, so his spouse is dumping him.”

But if you see:

dude getting a divorce -> sleeps around

Then you might interpolate, “finally free of his toxic marriage, dude is seeing other people.”

This method is probably hella difficult to pull off, and I’m not sure I’d want to do it in a game. But then:

Monday, November 07, 2016

What I did in the past week, in between frantically checking and rechecking fivethirtyeight.com, was write up the playthrough for She Who Must Not Be Named. Last week was the rethink. This week I wrote it up, and I’ve started in on the scenes, including one with our Hammer [Films] Villain. There’s a fair amount of carnage; we’ll have to redo some minutes of animation. But the story will be better for it – more jeopardy, and more aligning of player objective with player character objective.

Also did the same for our Mad Scotsman, although his story is holding up a bit better. We can probably keep most of our animation, but some of the dialog in those cutscenes will change.

Meanwhile, Lisa is creating gobs of environmental narrative for all sorts of places. Environmental narrative comprises the letters and diaries and signs and objects that you might find here and there that tells you what has been happening in the place you're lurking about. It creates the worldiness of the world.

All of which means more recording sessions, of course. I’m looking forward to it!

Friday, October 28, 2016

I needed eleven lines from our Mad Scotsman for some revisions we’re making to a scene in the Train Station. But an actor’s minimum call is an hour. So I’ve been writing barks for him – 225 of them. That should round out the hour, eh?

I’ve been working on rethinking the playthrough for She Who Must Not Be Named. G had an issue that she did not seem to be in enough jeopardy; and that the player character’s motivations didn’t line up enough with the player’s own motivations. So I’ve been reworking the story logic and the characters involved. This will involved a fair amount of carnage – animations we have to throw out – but it will result in a more powerful story and better integration between gameplay and story.

And, I’ve done a pass on the journal text. You are reading your journal, right?

I used to teach the English side of the SAT for the Princeton Review, an SAT prep company. I had the advanced class, which was about 50% Korean immigrants who were still learning idiomatic English.

I told them the best thing they could do to improve their English was read Raymond Chandler. He's the guy who wrote The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely. You know, the Humphrey Bogart movies. (Or, at least, the movies I remember as starring Humphrey Bogart, even when it was actually Robert Mitchum.)

See, you don't need great literature to learn English. In fact it's not idea. First, great literature is taxing on your brain. Second and more importantly, it's all about nuance. When you don't already know the nuances, you're apt to muddy your learning. What you need is stylish writing. Raymond Chandler had style to burn:

"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window."

"The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back."

"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."

"She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theatre curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air."

“In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.”

That last one is indeed his plotting style. Don't read Chandler for an airtight plot. Read Chandler for how to turn short old words into magic; for how to give your sentences rhythms that have the sway and slash of poetry without reminding you that you're reading words on a page. Read Chandler because his books are very hard to put down.